Is Another App What We Need to Feel Better?

It feels like everyday a new app goes viral that promises to better our lives, whether that means allowing us to access the latest viral trends, a book to read while we’re waiting in line, or personal transportation to get you from point A to B. We’re inundated with apps that provide us, in their own ways, with that little hit of dopamine. 

One field that, until recently, had yet to join the app brigade is health care. The industry took a backseat when apps hit popularity, growing by the billions in the spaces of ecommerce and entertainment in the 2010s (and continue to do so). Health apps lacked user-friendly interfaces and any abilities beyond general information, data collection of pre-entered symptoms, or answers that didn’t immediately suggest you have cancer. 

With the growing use of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning being applied to the latest technology, digital health care and its capabilities are now growing exponentially, offering patients and clinicians opportunities to put health back into their own hands.

At MINDCURE, we're producing an app dedicated to mental wellness that uses data and AI to create an optimized experience for psychedelic-therapy clinicians and their clients, improve care practices and headspace respectively, one day at a time.

Whether we want it or not, our interactions with technology have become a crucial aspect in our lives. The data and tools are here with the ability to be put to use for the benefit of mental health, but what's missing is the platform to pull it all together securely and efficiently.

‍

Digital Therapy

Digital therapeutics, also known as DTx, are addressing patient needs through the use of apps and wearable monitoring devices. 

Common features of these apps include:

• Analyzing data and helping people gauge their health
• Predicting future health issues and finding the right treatment path before a situation worsens
• Using motivational or cognitive stimulation to cause behavioral change. This can improve the overall health of the population by allowing biopharma companies to adhere in a better manner while also allowing health care providers to offer measures that could prevent or delay the onset of chronic diseases
• Connecting or linking with wearables, such as watches and fitness trackers, to record data that can be used to understand patients’ overall mental status

Digital therapeutics not only collect, but analyze all of this data that can lead to personalized treatment plans, reduce the risk of complications, and make communicating between clinicians and clients easier by tracking  moods and external environment in and out of therapy sessions. 

The biggest benefit of digital therapeutics platforms is the ability to address unmet patient needs that traditional therapy and treatment fail to cover. The modernization of therapy is finally here. According to McKinsey, as of 2018, investment in the industry has topped $1 billion with an ever-growing interest.

‍

How Consumer Tech Is Changing the Landscape of Healthcare

Dr. John Brownstein, a Computation Epidemiologist from Harvard University and advisor for MINDCURE, has been working for the past several years on healthcare that utilizes “the digital phenotype.” A phenotype being the set of observable characteristics an individual can have resulting from the interactions of its genotype with the environment.

Dr. Brownstein's 2018 GoogleTalk addresses the digital phenotype as the way in which our health state can be recognized by the clues in the interactions we have digitally. His main research asks, how can we harness non-traditional information to inform health. He says, “data is siloed by the different companies that own it, but to be able to collect and analyze all of that data could lead to infinite insights.” Digital phenotyping would be able to really match what people are experiencing in the real world. 

Health care systems need to find better ways to interact with patients and to collect data that could potentially drive outcomes. Dr. Brownstein believes voice-based tools are going to play a huge role as these apps continue to be developed. Citing Gartner Inc., he mentioned that, in 2020, 50% of all searches would happen through voice, and by 2022, 55% of all US households will have a smart speaker.

Since 2017, MINDCURE has been working to create a digital therapy app to fill in the gaps Dr. Brownstein mentioned in his talk, and more: the gaps seen in modern mental health and psychedelic treatment that have yet to be addressed on a larger scale. 

iSTRYM solves issues with efficiency, transparency, and security by providing clinicians and patients with real-time data regarding patient care, procedures, protocols, and other resources for those struggling with mental health concerns. 

An App Like iSTRYM

iSTRYM’s seamless application equips patients as active participants in their own mental wellness journey.

Partnered with LUCID, Speak Ai, and SOMA Breath, the goal of iSTRYM is to disrupt the healthcare industry by ushering in the next generation of mental wellness apps. Using AI, the app contains strategic data loops that continually update insights to provide accessible and innovative technological resources, optimizing the use of patient data to support both diagnoses and treatments.

The app records data like weather, location, mood, heart rate, and other metrics that take place after therapy sessions and throughout the integration process. It then records commonalities among patients to steer clinicians towards better diagnoses, treatments, and personalized care.

Partnered with Speak Ai, the app also uses machine learning to analyze natural language processing to drive insights. Founder of SpeakAi, Tyler Bryden said it best, “by developing solutions with empathy, we can improve the level of care to help people avoid, navigate through, and recover from crises.” 

Technology, he says, can play a major role in enabling these potentially life-changing and individual therapies to succeed at scale. 

The app fills in the gaps that have been found between clients, researchers, and therapists that usually cause disparities of critical insights coming from psychedelic-assisted therapy sessions. iSTRYM connects patient feedback and clinician expertise in one place. 

Using AI, iSTRYM technology and its partners are finding ways to enhance quality therapy through speech, music, communication, and daily inputs from patients that are qualified into tangible assets to inform treatments. 

iSTRYM is developing as the leading digital therapeutics tool helping to heal the world’s pain.